Linux needs to get its collective act together soon
Its always nice when someone agrees with you isn’t it? You see, I wrote an interesting (or at least I thought it was interesting) piece on what I thought the Linux community needed to do to stay relevant in today’s market place. Specifically, what they needed to accomplish if they ever had any desire to become a force on the desktop. Oh, and if you were wondering what website I wrote it for check out 2Guys A Mac And A Website
This is what I wrote on June 1st:
Linux on the desktop
And this is what the Linux & Open source guy over at eweek.com wrote on June 7th:
eweek dude’s opinion
We both basically have the same point (though I come across much stronger and crazier) but it boils down to Linux needs to trim off all of the useless pieces, pick a desktop and run with it. KDE or Gnome I don’t care and it doesn’t matter.
What you say? It doesn’t matter? But every Linux geek in the room is howling in protest! It does matter they chant. Open source, freedom to chose, blah blah blah.
Shut up already, damn it.
While the Linux community bickers about which desktop they want or which installer is the best Apple is making sure that OS X just widens its lead from the rest of the pack. Its really a shame too because Microsoft has pretty much dismantled Longhorn to the point where its barely more than XP service pack 3.
And so now of all times is when Linux should step up to the plate, unite behind the strongest distros, pick a desktop and make a concerted effort to improve it. Of course it will never happen but we can dream right?
Why will it never happen you say? The same reason Europe will never unite into one country. Oh they cooperate when its suits them, and they play nice, but deep down inside every one of them thinks that “their” system is the best. Imagine how hard it would be for anything to get done in the USA if New Mexico kept trying to get Maine to switch to communism. Or if Virginia decided that they would adopt the English form of driving and so everybody would have to switch sides of the road when entering the state.
It would be chaos. Nothing would get done, everybody would be out for themselves and no real progress would be made. Hum, sounds a lot like the Linux desktop sometimes.
Linus Torvalds has a great chance to stand up and try and unite the Linux community. He should throw his support behind one distro and one desktop manager and loudly proclaim that for better or for worse this is the way its going to be. But sadly he isn’t that kind of leader.
Maybe thats the real problem, the Linux community needs new leadership. Someone who has a vision and can guide hordes of geeks and developers towards a goal.
Or maybe Linux will just continue to stand around arguing about which desktop manager really is the best while the rest of the world moves on. Yes, that seems most likely. Oh well, at least they make a good server product. Maybe they should just stay where they belong.
Later.
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Comments
Didn’t Linus vote with his feet? He uses a Mac - albeit still running a Linux distro.
You are dead right tho, Linux’s great strength has become it’s great weakness.
As long as there is so much choice, it will never mainstream because for Joe consumer it’s too confusing. And even if he might consider one of those streamlined distros that even look and feel like Windows, he’s still going to be hesitant because of the other distros available.
Joe and Jo consumer don’t like making tech choices. They’re sheep. Getting them to switch flocks is Apple’s challenge too.
But as you very rightly say, Linux make it sooo hard on themselves by having so many small flocks. They need one big flock.
And you know what else? For Linux to mainstream, we have to take it off the geeks. They’re the ones who want to keep it so broad and confusing.
The leadership you seek, needs to come from someone like a Bill or Steve. Someone who is a savvy marketer first, and computer nerd (not geek) second.
On the home consumer side, Linux needs a killer app. A killer app is what made the Mac. A killer app is what made Microsoft.
A killer app has made Linux viable on the server side, but nothing exists yet on the home user side that is compelling enough for users to make a switch.
I think it’s the desktop that needs the killer app, not just home.
On the Mac it was Pagemaker
On the DOS PC it was Lotus 123
On the Windows PC, it was MS Word
On Linux?? You’re right, there isn’t one.
I really doubt that there will ever be a killer desktop app just for Linux. Since every app is open source, anything good gets ported to Mac OS X anyway…
You pick a piece of a much larger problem. Having multiple choices for desktop, apps and distros may or may not be a problem for newbies. But is it really the “main and only” reason behind slow Linux desktop growth? It is not.
Some other people here already mentioned the need of a “killer app”. Again, that’s not all. There are many different aspects of the problem. Like what OS people get in a store, what OS will they learn on in a school, getting to know that GNU/Linux exists and can be used instead, getting hardware/software to funcion under it, not very good marketing of linux distributions, prejudices, etc.
There are many reasons for low Linux desktop growth. Not a single one. It’s nice what you say, unite, remove “useless pieces” and everything will be allright. But it will not. It might be a little bit easier for a newbie in the beginning (not mentioning that almost anyone who develops for GNU/Linux would probably be against), but will that make them stay with GNU/Linux? Hardly. “Being too complex” is a very rare reason for abandoning GNU/Linux, while not being able to run my favorite game or click on the blue E icon to get to internet is much more common.
Hi, I’ve being working as IT proffesional in Europe for more than a decade. My company offer consultancy, maintenance and support for Windows, Linux and Mac. I just want to highlight some missconceptions about Linux in the Mac community.
1.- Mac is dead outside the USA. Yes, you still can buy a Mac in Europe, and some small industries use it (Graphics arts). But it represent nearly 0.0% in total IT bussiness. If you browse for example Jobserve.com searching for job vacancies related to Apple, Linux and Windows you find a surprissing ratio of 28 for Apple, 1230 for Linux and 3200 for Windows. Right, got it??. Don’t trust me, go to Jobserve.com and make your own statistics.
2.- Linux standarized on GNOME time ago. Just forget “small-curious” distros and go to proffesional ones (that’s, RedHat, Sun and Novell SuSE are all DEVELOPING and integrating on GNOME). KDE is brain-dead, due to conflicts with QT licences (you are free to use QT for Open source projects, but you have to PAY Trolltech if you want to make propietary apps ). See my post on Linux today (http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2005-06-25-002-26-OP-DT-0018)
3.- Linux is easy to use and install. Just forget exoteric distros and go to RedHat (Fedora) or Ubuntu. Obviously you will have problems if you go to Debian or Slackware, which are not designed for easy of use.
4.- Linux hardware support is extremnly good. Any notebook from HP, or IBM or ACER will work out of the box with Linux. Toshiba will not, since Toshiba is too much Microsoft friendly. Just get informed before making a blind decission. No serious bussiness dare NOT to support Linux those days. The ATI case is the best example. They never had an interest Linux support since the number of Linux desktops was minimal when compared to M$ installed base. They payed really hard and Sony opted for nVidia hardware for its brand new PS3 (Sony plans to support Linux destkop on PS3). ATI learnt the leason and now they are making a big effort to mantain Linux. The case is that Linux is an small percentage in the destkop market but is a dominant player in the embedded one.
5.- You consider Mac OSX a solid and strong system, but the case is that Mac OSX future doesn’t depend on Apple but on Adobe. If Adobe decides to leave Mac then Mac is dead. The decision of porting OSX to x86 is due to the Adobe pressure on Apple, that can’t bear anymore the small market share OSX represent right now. M$ is making movements to attack Adobe territory and so Adobe is making movements to attack M$ territory (Rumors of an Adobe Linux distro grows day in, day out, now that they buyed Macromedia).
6.- You looks to forget also that technology is leaving the desktop paradigm. Today Internet and Web apps is what matter. 99% of people just want to surf the Net and comunicate, they need a browser, not a desktop. People get used to Yahoo, to Google, to eBay, to blogs, to *Messenger, to its bank portal and suddenly all they just need is an embedded firefox browser on its TV, not a bloated and buggy desktop anymore. It didn’t worked time ago since browsers were too inmature (remember Netscape 4.x) and bandwith scarce, but now the browser technology is mature (Firefox, Macromedia, Java 5) and is not abnormal DSL and PCL connections with up to 8Mb of bandwith (compare that with the firsts 14400Kbs (0.001Mb) analog modems). WiMax -hispeed, long distance, wireless Internet- is round the corner as well as DSL2 -20Mbs-!! Services are on the Net, and people is not going to pay for CD software anymore, just for services. That’s why RedHat and other Linux distro don’t put much attention on the desktop. My company left desktop app development two years ago since it was no demand for it. Bussiness want a e-Portal to unify its workflow and data. That’s the reason why Windows 9x is still the first or second most deploy desktop around. Because people use it to exec a Internet browser, and they don’t feel any need to upgrade. The desktop/server frontier is blur today and on the server arena Linux is getting the lead.
7.- Curious is too that you “nearly” put Mac against Linux, while there is not technical impediment for Mac to change to a Linux kernel in future releases and share desktop technologies with freedesktop. To be true there is a big cooperation between Apple and Linux in what we could consider destkop oriented technologies (Rendevouz, gimp-print, OpenOffice, samba, Mono, ...) and base technologies (specially gcc, the gnu C compiler tool set and associated software).
In a not so far future Mac OSX could even become a new Linux flavour.
Linux is good for what it does. It does not do UI good. Should it? Sure, if the community wants it to.
No need to holler “Ack, dammit, we need a single desktop manager”
The beauty of open source (which obviously is being missed on an Apple blog) is that the communistic drive of software engineers will drive the technical nature of Linux. If the community had a relevantly large group of contributers concerned with a proper desktop environment - then it would/will happen. In fact, both KDE and GNOME would probably both have stellar experiences, accerating the state-of-the-art much faster than ever possible.
I for one hope that happens instead of a design dictator saying “One desktop, you geeks.”